Educators

About

The Necessity of Compassion

Kevin Myers - Portland, Oregon

As heard on This I Believe Podcast, August 14, 2018

As a young boy, Kevin Myers felt outraged at being treated unfairly because of his life circumstances. However, his mother taught him an important lesson in forgiving others that he still carries with him today.

Top Essays USB Drive

This USB drive contains 100 of the top This I Believe audio broadcasts of the last ten years, plus some favorites from Edward R. Murrow's radio series of the 1950s. It's perfect for personal or classroom use! Click here to learn more.

I believe in the power of determination and the necessity of compassion. My parents were good Irish Catholics from the north of Boston. They believed in boiling their food flavorless, and that the only joy in God is when he gets to smite someone. They divorced when I was six. We were the first family in our congregation to choose eternal damnation over an insufferable marriage, which caused considerable social discomfort to my family and particularly to my mother.

Being a coach of both Little League baseball and church league basketball, a member of the Knights of Columbus, a local business owner, and a drinking buddy of our priest, my father weathered the brimstone and hellfire storm better than the rest of us. In fact, he seemed to revel in his role as victim of my mother’s sinful plot to raise fatherless children and defy Papal Doctrine.

Nobody seemed to notice that we children were far less clumsy after our father left: we stopped falling down stairs, we stopped bumping our heads on doors, and we could sit without wincing. Nobody questioned why we went without food, why I had to wear my sister’s old winter clothes, or why we lacked fuel to heat our house. Nobody noticed, nobody asked, and nobody told, even when we were reproached on the steps of our church. We just turned the other cheek and let the rest of our bodies follow, never to return.

My mother couldn’t find work and we went on assistance, as she called it. One day she and I stood on the sidewalk waiting for the welfare office to open; two men drove by in a work truck and yelled, “Get a job!” I was maybe seven years old, but I was so filled with rage that I knew I could have killed those men with my bare hands. I started after them, and my mother jerked me back. She knelt down and looked into my eyes. I’m sure she felt my rage, which reached far past two strangers in a beat-up old truck. She told me that I should have compassion for those men because they didn’t understand the pain they caused a small boy. She told me that if I couldn’t forgive them that I risked becoming like them.

It was a long time before I understood her advice.

When I look back at that time, I marvel at how my mother got us through an energy crisis, a recession, and resisted the pressure to stay in a harmful marriage. Her determination was manifest in her working long hours, weekends, and holidays, but the benefit of her compassion is far more subtle. Her determination gave us a better quality of life, but learning compassion raised her spirit above the cruelty and pettiness of those who made her life so much harder than it needed to be.

And oh, to the men in the truck: I forgive you.

Kevin Myers lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two wonderful children. He is the director of communications for Reed College. Mr. Myers wrote and directed the feature film Emerson Park, and his agent and he are currently seeking a publisher for his first novel, Ambition.edu.

Recorded by KTOO in Juneau, Alaska and produced by Dan Gediman for This I Believe, Inc.

Essay of the Week

On August 28, 1963, Benita Porter went with her mother to attend the March on Washington. It was during Dr. King’s spellbinding message of hope, love, and the universality of mankind that Ms. Porter was inspired by the belief that words—her own words—could arouse passion, change minds, and bring about social change. Click here to read her essay.

What Students Believe

Throughout the school year, young people around the world write statements of belief as a classroom exercise. And thousands of those students have submitted their essays to our series. Click here to read a sampling of what young people believe.